Now that there is renewed talk of power outages, its time to remind everyone about what can be done to keep life tolerably comfortable during those hours of electricityless-ness. Many people will have purchased generators or inverters during the previous round f load shedding two years ago, and now might be a good time to check that everything is working properly. Here are a few tips that might be of value.

The recent tariff increase agreement between NERSA and ESCOM will be a further blow to middle income earners, who are already suffering the after effects of the recent recession. They will be hardest hit because for them, there are no rebates and their position in the labour market is still uncertain. The increases mean that electricity costs will almost double at the end of two years.